


this story is about the opposite of consumption

by gottagofast



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Existentialism, Gen, Star Gazing, is it coherent??, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:38:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2737844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gottagofast/pseuds/gottagofast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are all part of the space that looks like darkness but is really a thousand tiny lights that you can't discern and Bellamy is holding her hand and it is more than she thought never being touched would ever feel like</p><p>tw for existentialism and talking about infinity and insignificance</p>
            </blockquote>





	this story is about the opposite of consumption

**Author's Note:**

> ????????

Alright, listen, listen. All the arks a home and space is an infinite layer of insulation muffling the lights of the stars. Science says the black isn't even black, that the edges aren't even sharp; that if you ride out in the space that isn't dark, a thousand billion years later, your less than dust fingers still gripping the ignition will come crawling up on the back door of the home you left behind.

 

So space, like a blanket was in everything. It lived between the sheets, it preened in lungs and crawled inside your drawers, curling up beneath your desks in the school pod.

 

The sounds of different languages are comforting to Clarke, she likes knowing they exist, that liminality is still, when space renders so little ever less. Does love exist in the threshhold of something that has no beginning. Clarke drives herself to the brink that has soft edges, that circles back around convincing herself that she exists, that their existence as a grain of sand under an indeterminable interminable light on a beach that would not miss them anymore than she misses the millions of skin cells that flake off of her skin every 10 hour day, is.

 

Existentialism is not a new taste. Like everything on the ark, her fears are recycled, left over from what was left of people who walked beneath trees and stepped on ants. Clarke has a 97 year buffer between herself and people who knew what being small was in a different way. Touching the bark around the base of a tree, standing on roots and watching shaking leaves miles above you must absolve a little. Seeing the mechanics must be some kind of balm, instead of just endless space.

 

* * *

 

 

Other parts of science (which is all connected to the question - _why?_ is the only constant she can find in the uncomfortable feeling when she cant answer, a hollow, _i don't know_ ), more science tells her that two objects will never really touch and she believes it in the same way you believe a second hand account of a murder while you're standing at the crime scene.

 

It's better as a math question for her. It's better in black and white, which science never really is, another threshhold. If we are so small as to, for all intents and mild unambiguous purposes of this unbidden universe, not exist, never exist, and continue to plod on in inexistance, than it makes sense that, in the same way the blackness between stars is not black at all but really just an impermanent kind of emptiness, that, in a negative image type of way, the space you close between you and another human being is always open. The invisible strings you do your best to work backwards and follow in science are impossibly tangled. Rare moments of clarity, staring at her flush palms, are the only things she comes close to grasping.

 

She is grateful for that last remaining space everytime she learns something new about Finn.

 

She grows and grows and grows less aware of how short life is. Security grants you that luxury of turning your back on the building blocks of the things, of remembering in that age old way that every human being remembers, survival is for the fittest. When living is all you have to live for you take that risk. When living is all you have to live for you do not stare out your skylight and choke on the realization that you will never leave a lasting mark, that the longest humanity could go having been taken unawares is 97 years - less than a heatrtbeat, less that a single cell peeling away, less than the space between a heartbeat, that pause.

 

Is humanity the intake of breath before you start speaking? Is the whole universe a long winded speech that ends in a final infernal implosion? Is there ever any breath?

 

There is breath Clarke draws into her lungs when she pulls away from that first kiss. There is her heartbeat loud in her ears and the things she's never known, the things about survival and family and what the expression crawling over broken glass really means in the darkest time of night.

 

When she kisses Bellamy she is not so afraid of what falling out of the sky meant. When she kisses Bellamy maybe for one moment in which nothing is moving and that now in which everything exists exactly as it does - it is - it is her letting go of a string shes been tugging on. 

 

It's the sound of a star crushing itself under it's own weight in a blaze of glory. How can you call such an ending sinful? Religion feared, just as she, the weight of space pressing down on her and they called it the heavens and called the fear of their responsibility sin and called out to the darkness between for benevolent radiant help.

 

Science Clarke knows, _Science_ , tells her, you, that there is no space, that in the end the places things are, are never empty and the fact that Clarke exists and can look up at the heavens without a shield of glass, tethered to Bellamy by that space she will never breach but is always buffering there, she can look up at the sky and know that there is something there where she sees nothing.

 

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell im having an existential crisis
> 
> im  
> oh my god nothing to say ab this srry if i scare anyone
> 
> if you panic ssometimes [this](https://38.media.tumblr.com/cdef846a4eabf7be9ec071b17118d7c9/tumblr_nexv126czE1ql82o1o1_500.gif) helps me. i breathe in time with it
> 
> edit: so i realized time above the earth by the kooks is kind of the soundtrack to this fic


End file.
